I’ve found that ch and ex units are heavily influenced by latin characters. They just give weird results with non-latin characters leading to magic numbers. But the concept is really solid: use them if you want the spacing relative to text.

There is no way I will abandon px.

In fact, I think CSS made the wrong decision by proliferating so many things, em, %, px, ch, whatever-else. The human brain is not well-equipped to have so many things for basically the same thing. That's a design flaw in CSS, plain and simple. And the author is thus also wrong. There won't be a mass movement of people using "ch". It would be a good first april article though.

Layout shift when the font loads

I also did some experiment with ch many years ago. I found that 60ch is ideal width for block text for easy reading. too bad it is pretty hard to make websites with only 60ch wide.

What happened to em?

What I want to know is who decided to break px, the last thing we need is yet another screwball physical measurement, css was already full of them. But what "tut tut, everybody is using px and these new hi-dpi displays are rendering things really tiny, we can't have that" and now px as a useful unit is ruined.

Is there a way to use real pixels? My, admittedly quick, search says no. at least nothing jumps out at me from the spec.